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How to Start Reading Manga when you Hate Yotsuba

You want to dive into manga as soon as possible. It’s the next logical step after learning the basics, and it is a great place to enter reading real Japanese material. Where do you start? No matter where you go, you can’t escape the recommendation to try out Yotsuba. The reasons are always the same: it is simply written, easy to understand, has normal daily life vocabulary, and is a fun slice of life story.

This is great… until you realize that you hate Yotsuba.

Take a deep breath. You didn’t somehow stray from the Japanese path of light.

I don’t care if something is considered scientifically the greatest piece of study magic in the world. The second you hate it, it loses all its power. I’ve said this with Anki. I’ve said this with RTK. Efficiency quickly becomes inefficient.

Yotsuba is great. But there are plenty of people out there who don’t like it and think it’s boring. If you find yourself as one of them, you should not force yourself to read it. Forced reading leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to…

You’ve found yourself in the hate zone. Now what?

Yotsuba may be the first beginner recommendation, but is not the only one. I consider it part of the trilogy of beginner recommendations. The 2nd is Dragon Ball, and the 3rd is 俺物語 (My Love Story).

Dragon ball? That crazy action anime where people scream at each other and fight until they turn blue? Sort of. Dragon Ball is an entirely different manga when it starts and all the characters are children. For the first several volumes it is a simple tale full of wonder, adventure and comedy. Most importantly, the level of Japanese used is perfect for beginners.俺物語, a much more recent and modern manga, is a high school romantic comedy. This description is enough to turn off people who would easily say “I’m not interested in that genre.” But I urge you to try it. Humor is at the center of the story, and it is heartwarming and will bring a smile to anyone reading it. As with the rest of the beginner recommendation trilogy, the language here will rarely trip you up.

This is why the Jalup Immersion series uses these 2 manga in the early stages. Hate Yotsuba? Please try these other 2 next (samples here and here), and see what happens from there.

But I hate all 3!

You don’t like the trilogy. You don’t like other beginner recommendations. Is all hope lost? Maybe you think that you’ll just focus on textbook material for a while longer. Or maybe you think you’ll just watch anime with subtitles instead to make things more enjoyable.

At this point, I recommend 2 steps.

1. Try manga you are interested in regardless of the level

When you find something you like, and are just dying to read, don’t hesitate in taking a look at it. Creating an artificial level block isn’t always a wise choice. Sure you would have understood 80% of Yotsuba. But understanding 50% of One Piece, a manga you’ve wanted to start reading for a long time, might just be a much better study experience.

2. Read the material in English first, then in Japanese

This may feel like cheating, but this still is an efficient way to get into native material you can enjoy, without relying on beginner-only targets.

In order to improve this technique, you may want to limit yourself to manga you had read before you started studying Japanese, rather than read something new in English and then immediately read it in Japanese. This will prevent internal translations, and will decrease your time with the English version (since that is already time that has passed previously).

Also, rather than reading full chapters or volumes in English, you can try just limiting yourself to reading plot summaries in English first, then the full Japanese version.

Find the manga you actually want to read

Have any of you tried Yotsuba but couldn’t get into it? What “beginner manga” or manga that you just found enjoyable did you use in its place?

Comments

How to Start Reading Manga when you Hate Yotsuba — 24 Comments

I am experimenting watching anime with *Japenese* subtitles. I first did it with Stains;gate in VLC and actually went through the all thing actually enjoying the anime. However, the progress was somewhat slow, as I would often have to look up words on Jisho (it became easier when I just copied them from the subtitle file instead of looking up the kanji on SLJ FAQ).

Since then, I have written a some Javascript to display subtitles in the web browser above the video (*not* as actual subtitles). This lets me use something like Rikaichan to quickly look up words. This is a similar to Animelon (which is almost what I want, but the forced spacing in the Japanese subtitles is often wrong and break the dictionary look-up; also probably not that good to practice reading), maybe to AnimeLab (which I cannot access since not in Oceania) and quite different from Anime Planet (which does not show word translation). My source for Japanese subtitles is [1].

Fortunately for me, I fell in love with Yotsubato at first read. I’m going to try to read the Harry Potter series next, and then dive into material that is closer to my interests like philosophy and science.

I had no idea that there was a “holy trinity” of beginner manga, I always only hear Yotsuba! I love dragon ball & loved watching the anime of 俺物語 so these will definitely be my next purchase once I receive Yotsuba!

One Piece is a very fun manga. So if that’s what someone has wanted to read and is a major motivator, a little extra difficulty should not stop anyone from going right into that long, long, long journey.

One little question that I have: when you start reading something low level like these; should I be looking up words that I don’t know? Considering I wont be adding them to SRS or anything since I’m still doing the JALUP cards… just look up to know what it means and go on? or not look up and just skip them

If you are going through the Jalup decks, I would read for fun and cementing what you’ve learned in a native scenario. While occasionally looking up a word you feel you need to know is fine, you do not need to add cards, or look up every word.

When I first moved to Japan and my Japanese was still at an elementary level, I spent about 16 hours reading my first volume of manga in Japanese.

The manga was Tenkensai (aka Tenken), still to this day one of my favorites, and I have no regrets.

So where there’s a will there’s a way.

However, whether this method will work for you will vary from person to person depending on how much you’re willing to persevere with something above your ability level without getting so frustrated that it becomes a disagreeable chore (and, because you hate it, not an effective study method). For people who don’t mind textbooks, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to stick with textbooks until you get to a point where you find some Japanese media you can enjoy at the level that you’re at. For people who do hate textbooks and conventional study methods, it might be worth a shot to try persevering with some media you actually enjoy. Also, like Adam mentioned, things you have already experienced are good, and video games also work really well for this especially if, for example, you’ve already played through Chrono Trigger in English multiple times to see all the different endings.

I’m sorry it’s a bit off topic for the subject of manga, but along the lines of learning that is appropriate to a person’s level, why not just get out there and talk to some real, live Japanese people? Human beings are in most cases incredibly good at using simple language and slowing down their speaking speed to help you understand if they know that you are just learning their language.

With websites like italki making it easy and free to find a language exchange partner, location is no longer an excuse.

Conversation is about 50% listening and 50% speaking, so it will help with the problems like listening skills outpacing speaking skills, or reading/writing skills outpacing listening/speaking skills, that people sometimes have if they don’t practice speaking a language.

Everyone’s learning style is different, and what motivates you will probably vary from person to person, but humans are social mammals and there are probably a lot of people out there who, like me, will find their retention of and motivation towards Japanese skyrocket when they have real opportunities to talk with real people.

Manga is awesome, too. But I just thought I’d put this out there, since human beings are awesome and intelligent language learning resources that automatically adapt themselves to your current level.

So I’ve read through Yotsubato which I knew I would enjoy as I had already read through it in the past haha and I understood a lot more than I expected! Of course it was rare that I’d understand a full sentence but when I did, it was an amazing feeling! And there’s so many times that I’d see a kanji that while I haven’t learned the word in the Jalup decks yet, I HAVE seen the kanji in Kanji Kingdom and thus knew what it meant (and made sense in context)! I am so glad I have done this!

Now I just started reading Ore Monogatari (I’m reading this before dragon ball because I dont intend on buying this series whereas I do want to own dragon ball so I have to wait until I can afford it haha) and again thankfully already know what happens (I watched the anime a while ago!) and once more I am surprised at how simple the text is! There was a somewhat long sentence that I only needed to look up a single word and suddenly it all made sense! It was great! I also have been putting your recommendation of “dont look up too much and just enjoy the ride to cement what you are learning” to use and man it is awesome haha

Reading this, it is almost like the me from 4 years ago wrote it. Thanks for helping me remember the joy I had studying. ^^
I felt the exact same excitement you just wrote about. これから更に楽しくなると思いますので、これからも頑張って楽しく勉強してくださいね！